School Advert Quotes

Acknowledgements! My thanks to Hollywood When you showed me John Rambo Stitching up his arm with no anaesthetic And giving them “a war they won’t believe” I knew then my calling, the job for me Thanks also to the recruitment adverts For showing me soldiers whizzing around on skis And for sending sergeants to our school To tell us of the laughs, the great food, the pay The camaraderie I am, dear taxpayer, forever in your debt You paid for my all-inclusive pilgrimage One year basking in the Garden of Eden (I haven’t quite left yet) Thanks to Mum and thanks to Dad Fuck it, Thanks to every parent Flushing with pride for their brave young lads Buying young siblings toy guns and toy tanks Waiting at the airport Waving their flags

The real crisis of capitalism is that product development lags so far behind the best insights of advertising. Since the 1960s, advertising has worked out just how much we need help with the true challenges of life. It has fathomed how deeply we want to have better careers, stronger relationships, greater confidence. In most adverts, the pain and the hope of our lives have been superbly identified, but the products are almost comically at odds with the problems at hand. Advertisers are hardly to blame. They are, in fact, the victims of an extraordinary problem of modern capitalism. While we have so many complex needs, we have nothing better to offer ourselves, in the face of our troubles, than, perhaps, a slightly more accurate chronometer or a more subtly blended perfume. Business needs to get more ambitious in the creation of new kinds of “products,” in their own way as strange-sounding today as a wristwatch would have been to observers in 1500. We need the drive of commerce to get behind filling the world—and our lives—with goods that really can help us to thrive, flourish, find contentment, and manage our relationships well.

...[T]hough the whole point of his "Current Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency. Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion. He might as well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of prophecy that nobody would attend to. The four and six-penny manual, mostly in his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized, may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman.

As I travel the world, I hear young brothers and sisters talk about the "American dream"--a big house with a swimming pool and posh furniture and a servant--and I recognize that place as a jail. I hear talk, talk, talk on adverts and reality tv shows, nattering constantly about that narrow vision or worth and wealth, and I can't help but contrast that with the young African in Monrovia whose dream is to have a library, or the child in Syria whose dream is to go to a school with a roof, or the young black man in the United States who's attacked for simply saying, "My life matters.

An extraordinary number of adverts focus on the three very things that Epicurus identified as false lures of happiness: romantic love, professional status and luxury.

seeing pictures of pretty clothes in Jackie magazine that she’d never be able to buy. She’d hated seeing adverts for summer holidays on the telly, in far off places they’d never be able to visit. She hated seeing the Queen giving her ruddy speech from her golden palace, the likes of which she’d never know. What made them so much better? Soon enough, she’d realised that all those people she envied weren’t better, they were just smarter. They’d educated themselves and taken whatever chances came their way, to get ahead in life. The problem was, she didn’t even have GCEs. That’s when she’d enrolled in night school, and Simon had tagged along too. She’d always been the one to push him on, she thought, with a sad little sigh. “Looks like she’s going to pull through,” Mike said, interrupting her reverie. Everything about her husband was an irritant, and had been since they were children knocking about in the playground. Michael Emerson had been a poser all his life; a flirt, a braggart, a man other men tolerated but did not necessarily like. Living with him had been a penance, and she’d paid it for long enough. “I want a divorce,” she said, very clearly. She heard his shocked intake of breath, and he shifted in the driver’s seat to look at her. “What?” he blustered. “What are you talking about?” “Oh, come on, Mike. You know there’s nothing between us. There hasn’t been for a long time.” Ever. He sat in absolute silence for long, tense seconds as she stared out of the windscreen and watched a light drizzle coat the glass. “You haven’t thought this through,” he said, but didn’t bother to argue with the sentiment. His girlfriend had been asking for him to get a divorce for months, now, but he’d never actually planned to go through with it. Their lives were too entwined. Too dependent. “You need me,” he said, simply. “It’ll look bad for your next campaign.” Sally laughed. “I need you?” she said bitterly, but stopped herself from launching into a tirade, not wanting to go too far. “Listen, Mike. This can work for both of us,” she said, in a placatory tone. “We can sell up and share the proceeds. We can still work together as business partners.” “Oh, aye,” he said. “What about your new partner? What would he have to say about that?” Sally said nothing. “Well, he needs me too. You both do,” Mike said, arrogantly, and turned the